Space news and Exploration II

[ScienceRocks]

India's Mars Probe to attempt orbital insertion on Wed.

Success would make India the 4th nation to successfully get to Mars, the first one to do so on it's first attempt, and would be one of the cheapest missions ever.

http://indiatoday.in...e/1/384102.html

 

[mamooth]

Resupply mission to the ISS goes up, the fourth one using a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

NASA Cargo Launches to Space Station aboard SpaceX Resupply Mission NASA

 

[Vikrant]

India's Mars Probe to attempt orbital insertion on Wed.

Success would make India the 4th nation to successfully get to Mars, the first one to do so on it's first attempt, and would be one of the cheapest missions ever.

http://indiatoday.in...e/1/384102.html

Rock on India and ISRO!

 

[ScienceRocks]

Japanese construction giant Obayashi announces plans to have a space elevator up and running by 2050

Once the realm of science fiction, a Japanese company has announced they will have a space elevator up and running by the year 2050.

If successful it would revolutionise space travel and potentially transform the global economy.

The Japanese construction giant Obayashi says they will build a space elevator that will reach 96,000 kilometres into space.

Robotic cars powered by magnetic linear motors will carry people and cargo to a newly-built space station, at a fraction of the cost of rockets. It will take seven days to get there.

The company said the fantasy can now become a reality because of the development of carbon nanotechnology.

"The tensile strength is almost a hundred times stronger than steel cable so it's possible," Mr Yoji Ishikawa, a research and development manager at Obayashi, said.

Japanese construction giant Obayashi announces plans to have a space elevator up and running by 2050 - ABC News Australian Broadcasting Corporation

 

[ScienceRocks]

Resupply mission to the ISS goes up, the fourth one using a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

NASA Cargo Launches to Space Station aboard SpaceX Resupply Mission NASA

As far as I am concern the funding of spacex and solar energy will be the two things Obama's remembered for. Just like Nixon is known for the Epa.

 

[mamooth]

The stuff on the ISS resupply mission:

1. 600 kilos of crew supplies

2. A 3-D printer for zero-G. If it works, it gives the ISS some capability to manufacture their own parts.

3. Spinsat, a technology demonstration of a new electronic propulsion system for nanosatellites.
SpinSat

4. Space Station Integrated Kinetic Launcher for Orbital Payload Systems (SSIKLOPS, pronounced "cyclops"), a way to shoot out nanosatellites, instead of having to use the robotic arm.
Meet Space Station s Small Satellite Launcher Suite NASA

5. 20 white mice, and a bone density scanner for the mice.

6. ISS-Rapidscat, a microwave scanner to get detailed measurements of ocean winds.

 

[Vikrant]

India becomes the first Asian nation to reach Mars. It also becomes the first nation to succeed on the first try.

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NEW DELHI — India became the first Asian nation to reach the Red Planet when its indigenously made unmanned spacecraft entered the orbit of Mars on Wednesday — and the first nation in the world to successfully reach Mars on its first attempt.

India becomes first Asian nation to reach Mars orbit joins elite global space club - The Washington Post

 

[ScienceRocks]

Water discovered on Neptune-sized planet outside our solar system

Scientists found water vapor on a Neptune-sized planet 124 light years away from Earth, the first time an exoplanet smaller than Jupiter has been found with water. Their results are published in the journalNature.

Astronomers figure out what elements compose an exoplanet by studying how light from the planet's star is absorbed as the planet passes in front of it. Until now, Neptune-sized and smaller planets hadn't been possible to study, probably because of heavy cloud cover. When HAT-P-11b passed in front of its host star, in the constellation Cygnus, it showed clearly the planet had water vapor.

 

[mamooth]

On Sep 16, the US government launched the CLIO satellite on an Atlas V from Cape Canaveral. The purpose of the satellite and the agency owning it has been kept secret. Amateur satellite watchers are waiting to see what the final orbit is, which will give clues as to the purpose.

ULA Atlas V successfully launches secretive CLIO mission NASASpaceFlight.com

 

[ScienceRocks]

Moon's hidden valley system revealed

1 October 2014

Scientists have identified a huge rectangular feature on the Moon that is buried just below the surface.
The 2,500km-wide structure is believed to be the remains of old rift valleys that later became filled with lava.
Centred on the Moon's Procellarum region, the feature is really only evident in gravity maps acquired by Nasa's Grail mission in 2012.
But knowing now of its existence, it is possible to trace the giant rectangle's subtle outline even in ordinary photos.
Mare Frigoris, for example, a long-recognised dark stripe on the lunar surface, is evidently an edge to the ancient rift system.
"It's really amazing how big this feature is," says Prof Jeffery Andrews-Hanna.
"It covers about 17% of the surface of the Moon. And if you think about that in terms relative to the size of the Earth, it covers an area equivalent to North America, Europe and Asia combined," the Colorado School of Mines scientist told BBC News.
"When we first saw it in the Grail data, we were struck by how big it was, how clear it was, but also by how unexpected it was.
"No-one ever thought you'd see a square or a rectangle on this scale on any planet."

http://www.bbc.co.uk...onment-29447159

 

[ScienceRocks]

Microsoft co-founder’s company may fund space-bound passenger plane

Stratolaunch Systems, a commercial spaceflight startup company, might purchase a three-passenger version of Sierra Nevada’s Dream Chaser in a bid to implement its goals of putting both satellites and people into orbit beginning in 2018.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Vast glaciers carved out Martian Grand Canyon

HUGE glaciers may once have crept through Mars' version of the Grand Canyon. That's according to new analysis of data from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) spacecraft, which has spotted telltale signs of minerals left in the glaciers' wake.



Rock formations around Valles Marineris, a system of canyons running more than 4000 kilometres across the Red Planet's equator, have hinted that it once held glaciers that melted and caused a megaflood. Now Selby Cull at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania and colleagues have found mineralogical evidence that supports the idea.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Huge Cloud on Saturn's Moon Titan Is Made of Toxic Cyanide

1 October 2014

The discovery suggests that the air above Titan's poles can get much cooler than previously thought, scientists said. The huge cloud on Titan — it's about the size of Egypt — was first spotted by NASA's Cassini spacecraft in 2012, but only now is its cyanide composition understood.

http://www.space.com...moon-titan.html

 

[ScienceRocks]

Russia to Launch New GLONASS Navigation System Satellite by Year End


3 October 2014

A new model of the Russian GLONASS navigation system satellite will be launched at the end of this year, the JSC Information Satellite Systems, a leading Russian satellite manufacturing company, announced Wednesday.

"In November-December, 2014 we will launch the new GLONASS-K spacecraft. The launch is planned to be implemented from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome [in northern Russia] using a Soyuz 2.1b carrier rocket," Yury Vygonsky, deputy general designer for space systems development, general engineering and satellite control at JSC Information Satellite Systems, told journalists.

http://www.gpsdaily....ar_End_999.html

 

[mamooth]

The ISS-Rapidscat wind measuring package was installed on the outside of the Space Station, and is sending back good data. Installation was done entirely with a robotic arm, no spacewalks necessary.

JPL News NASA s New Winds Mission Installed Gathers First Data

The OCO-2 satellite, which measures carbon dioxide, is in good shape and going through a lengthy calibration process now. The data should start flowing from it in December.

News - Orbiting Carbon Observatory

 

[ScienceRocks]

Scientists Might Have Accidentally Solved The Hardest Part Of Building Space Elevators

By Ajai Raj 13/10/2014

Vincent Crespi Lab/Penn State University:

Diamond nanothreads are only a few atoms across, more than 20,000 times thinner than a human hair. They're also stronger and stiffer than any carbon nanotube or polymer to date, which could make them an ideal option for a space elevator tether.

 

[ScienceRocks]

First results from MAVEN mission:

NASA's newest Mars orbiter, MAVEN, has returned its first observations of the red planet's upper atmosphere, laying a promising foundation for answering a nagging question about the planet's environment: What happened to an atmosphere that supported a warm and wet planet some 4 billion years ago, only to become the dry, chilled desert that astronomers see today?

Although its science mission has yet to begin, the craft already has revealed clues with the first detailed measurements of the upper atmosphere's hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon, which back in the day would have appeared as water vapor and carbon dioxide – two potent gases for trapping heat near the surface.

This would have allowed liquid water to remain stable on the surface, providing potential habitats for microbial life.

from http://www.csmonitor...zzle-scientists

 

[ScienceRocks]

Huge Flock of Minisatellites Aims to Photograph the Entire Earth Every Day

Tracking what’s happening on Earth from space is becoming more and more feasible as Earth-observing satellites increase in number and resolution. The USGS’s Landsat mission has an incredible 40-year record of the planet’s changing landscape, with virtually every spot imaged every eight days. It’s an incredible scientific asset. But what if you could see every bit of the globe, every single day? That opens a new range of possible uses for satellite imagery.

This is the mission of Planet Labs.

 

[ScienceRocks]

Mercury's hidden water-ice revealed


16 October 2014

A Nasa spacecraft has provided the first optical images of ice within shadowed craters on Mercury.

It might seem curious that the closest planet to the Sun - where temperatures soar above 400C - could host water-ice.
But some of the craters on this hothouse world are always shadowed from the Sun, turning them into cold traps.
Using very low levels of light scattered off crater walls, scientists were able to build up a picture of what these frozen deposits look like.
The work, by researchers involved with Nasa's Mercury Messenger mission, has been published in the journal Geology.
Scientists suggested decades ago that water ice might be trapped in shadowed areas near the planet's poles. Then, in the 1990s, data from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico revealed areas that strongly reflect radar - a characteristic of ice.

http://www.bbc.co.uk...onment-29644406

 

[ScienceRocks]

New Study Sheds Light On Saturn’s “Death Star” Moon

A new study recently published in the journal Science, has taken the “Death Star” moon out of science fiction, and placed it firmly in just….science.

While the Herschel Crater on the surface of Mimas does beg Star Wars, it also has a massive wobble, that until recently, wasn’t explained given the size of the moon. The wobble is about twice as big as one might expect from a moon that size if it was a regular solid structure, turns out it might not be solid.

The researchers who penned the study suggest two reasons for the wobble, either it has a vast ocean beneath the surface or a core that is not so much spherical as rugby ball-shaped.